Radius Stabilization and Anomaly-Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking

TL;DR

The paper investigates a 5D brane-world with visible and hidden sectors on separate 3-branes, showing that direct Planck-suppressed contact terms are eliminated by 5D→4D matching. It identifies the radius modulus as a key dynamical field that must be stabilized to enable viable SUSY breaking transmission; stabilization is achieved via gaugino condensation in a bulk and a boundary SYM sector, generating an $r$-dependent superpotential. This stabilization yields a heavy radius modulus and a sequestered 4D SUGRA background, so anomaly-mediated SUSY breaking dominates the visible sector with a predictive, flavor-conserving pattern. The mechanism provides a natural path to AMSB-dominated soft terms without large fine-tuning beyond the cosmological constant, though the presence of extra light bulk fields could modify the conclusions.

Abstract

We analyze in detail a specific 5-dimensional realization of a "brane-universe" scenario where the visible and hidden sectors are localized on spatially separated 3-branes coupled only by supergravity, with supersymmetry breaking originating in the hidden sector. Although general power counting allows order 1/M_{Planck}^2 contact terms between the two sectors in the 4-dimensional theory from exchange of supergravity Kaluza-Klein modes, we show that they are not present by carefully matching to the 5-dimensional theory. We also find that the radius modulus corresponding to the size of the compactified dimension must be stabilized by additional dynamics in order to avoid run-away behavior after supersymmetry breaking and to understand the communication of supersymmetry breaking. We stabilize the radius by adding two pure Yang--Mills sectors, one in the bulk and the other localized on a brane. Gaugino condensation in the 4-dimensional effective theory generates a superpotential that can naturally fix the radius at a sufficiently large value that supersymmetry breaking is communicated dominantly by the recently-discovered mechanism of anomaly mediation. The mass of the radius modulus is large compared to m_{3/2}. The stabilization mechanism requires only parameters of order one at the fundamental scale, with no fine-tuning except for the cosmological constant.